Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models
This work addresses limited access and social stigma in narrative therapy for mental health support, though it is incremental in applying LLMs to a specialized domain.
The paper tackled the lack of realistic and progressive mental health support using large language models by developing an interactive narrative therapist (INT) and an assessment method (IMA) to track therapeutic progress. Results showed that INT outperformed standard LLMs in therapeutic quality and depth, as tested on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants.
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for mental health support, yet current approaches lack realism in simulating specialized psychotherapy and fail to capture therapeutic progression over time. Narrative therapy, which helps individuals transform problematic life stories into empowering alternatives, remains underutilized due to limited access and social stigma. We address these limitations through a comprehensive framework with two core components. First, INT (Interactive Narrative Therapist) simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate expert-like responses. Second, IMA (Innovative Moment Assessment) provides a therapy-centric evaluation method that quantifies effectiveness by tracking "Innovative Moments" (IMs), critical narrative shifts in client speech signaling therapy progress. Experimental results on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants reveal that INT consistently outperforms standard LLMs in therapeutic quality and depth. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of INT in synthesizing high-quality support conversations to facilitate social applications.